Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim country by population
(with over 200 million Muslims constituting a demographic of just
under 90 percent of the population) — is often held up as an
example of a modern, moderate Islamic democracy.
Indeed, this is precisely how
David Cameron — the current UK prime minister — characterized
Indonesia in a visit to the capital Jakarta back in April,
addressing students there with the following remarks: “The people
of Indonesia can show through democracy there is an alternative to
dictatorship and extremism. That here in the country with the
biggest Muslim population on the planet, religion and democracy
need not be in conflict.”
But is this conventional wisdom accurate? To begin with, it is
worth noting that as of this year, Indonesia is still denoted
“Free”
by Freedom House, scoring (on a descending scale of 1 to 7) 2 for
political rights and 3 for civil liberties. A report by the
think-tank from last year affirmed, “Indonesia is an electoral
democracy. In 2004, for the first time, Indonesians directly
elected their president and all members of the House of
Representatives (DPR), as well as members of a new legislative
body, the House of Regional Representatives (DPD).”
These elections — as well as direct elections for regional
leaders that began in 2005 — have generally been judged free and
fair. In addition, Freedom House declared that “Indonesia is home
to a vibrant and diverse media environment.”
However, these points do not make Indonesia a model of democracy
and civil rights for the Muslim world.
To begin with, consider the case of Aceh, an autonomous region
of Indonesia in the far north of Sumatra. Aceh rigorously enforces
aspects of Islamic law that curtail civil liberties. For example,
the sale of alcohol is banned and those caught gambling are
subjected to caning. Further, there is a special Islamic police
force in the province known as “Wilayatul
Hisbah” that oversees observance of a dress code, targeting
women wearing shorts or seemingly tight trousers.
Debate also continues over whether adulterers should be beaten
publicly — as is the current practice — or subject to the
punishment of stoning. In fact, the question of whether Islamic law
is enforced strictly enough was a talking point behind the election
of the provincial governor back in April. The incumbent Irwandi
Yusuf, who opposes stoning for adultery, lost out to
Zaini Abdullah, who promises to introduce a “purer” form of
Shari’a to the province.
It should be noted that Abdullah was a former rebel leader in
the Free Aceh Movement, which waged a 30-year insurgency campaign
against the central government. Autonomy and local elections came
as part of a peace agreement in 2005.
Yusuf, who was elected governor for a five-year term in December
2006, has always been seen as a maverick among the rebel movement
that has since morphed into the Aceh Party, which is described by
the
International Crisis Group as an “autocratic, almost feudal
party that brooks no dissent.” With the rise of Abdullah, who is
strongly backed by the Aceh Party, the latter can consolidate its
power in the province.
Aceh was probably the first area in what is now Indonesia to
adopt Islam. The Sultanate of Aceh that emerged in 1496 always had
a reputation for religious observance and fierce independence. In
the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was renowned for its pirates
who regularly conducted raids against Thailand, besides attacking
European and American trade convoys in the straits of Malacca. This
was one of the motives behind the eventual Dutch conquest of Aceh
in 1913.
As scholar and adviser on colonial affairs Christiaan Snouck
Hurgronje noted in his work
The Acehnese:
From Mohammedanism (which for centuries she [i.e., Aceh] is
reputed to have accepted) she really only learnt a large number of
dogmas relating to hatred of the infidel without any of their
mitigating concomitants; so the Acehnese made a regular business of
piracy and man-hunting at the expense of the neighboring
non-Mohammedan countries and islands, and considered that they were
justified in any act of treachery or violence to European (and
latterly to American) traders who came in search of pepper, the
staple product of the country. Complaints of robbery and murder on
board ships trading in Acehnese parts thus grew to be chronic.”
Now, it could be argued that Aceh is only an anomaly in
Indonesia. To be sure, the sale of alcohol is allowed elsewhere in
Indonesia. In addition, it would be wrong to generalize and claim
that Islam as practiced in Aceh is the same across the entire
country.
For instance, on the island of Java, which is home to the
country’s capital of Jakarta and has a population of 138 million,
the conversion from Islam to Hinduism was for many only a nominal
process, unlike Aceh. Consequently, they practiced a rather
syncretic form of the religion, and in recent years there has been
to a certain extent a
Hindu revival in Java.
Nonetheless, the overall trend is pointing in a
negative direction with respect to treatment of religious
minorities. In February of last year, a Christian man was convicted
of “blasphemy” against Islam and sentenced to five years in prison.
For Islamists in Java, this punishment was not enough, and in a
subsequent rampage they attacked
members of the Ahmadiyya sect that affirms its Muslim identity
but is deemed heretical by most orthodox Muslims. At the same time,
two churches were burned and a third razed to the ground.
To take another example,
in May of this year, on the outskirts of Jakarta, a Muslim mob
threw stones and bags of urine at a church on Ascension Day: the
culmination of an intimidation campaign that had begun in
January.
One could go on (a Christian center burned by a mob believing
that a new church was being built in violation of traditional
Islamic law), and the problem is that the government has failed to
protect religious minorities, with violence against them on the
rise.
For concrete statistics, one need only look at a
Guardian report from last month, which points out that
“last year, the local Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace
recorded 244 acts of violence against religious minorities —
nearly double the 2007 figure.”
The Guardian article, which focuses on the case of a
civil servant facing a prison sentence for posting “God doesn’t
exist” on Facebook, also points to the Indonesian Communion of
Churches, which says that around “80 churches have been closed each
year since President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono took power in 2004,
and an additional 1,000 congregations have faced harassment.”
In the case of West Papua, which has like Aceh been the center
of a
separatist movement, it is reported that the Indonesian
security forces are actively persecuting
Christians (see
here as well).
This is exactly reminiscent of the security forces’ behavior not
only in what is now East Timor but also in the Maluku Islands in
2000-2002, where many Indonesian soldiers cooperated with the
Islamist militant group Laskar Jihad’s campaign against Christian
Melanesians that killed up to 10,000
Christians.
The trend towards increasing intolerance was also
noted by the liberal Muslim writer Irshad Manji, who faced
harassment multiple times during her recent book tour in Indonesia
to promote her book
Allah, Liberty, and Love, which has now been
banned in neighboring Malaysia.
Compared with much of the Middle East and North Africa, as well
as countries like Pakistan, Indonesia is distant from Islamist
theocracy. It should be noted that many of the reports linked to
above come from Indonesian outlets like the Jakarta Post.
This indicates a commendable degree of press freedom that is by
contrast being increasingly eroded in Turkey, which is also upheld
as a model for the Muslim world but leads the globe in the
number of imprisoned journalists.
Nevertheless, the recent trends in Indonesia point to an
environment increasingly intolerant of religious minorities and
civil liberties: not only in Aceh, but also the nation in
general.
Observers often point to an influx of Wahhabi clerics from the
Middle East as the cause, but in my view one should also bear in
mind that what Daniel Pipes terms the “Islamic
revival,” which began in the 1970s on a global scale, is deeply
rooted in issues of identity and cannot simply be put down to oil
revenues flowing into Saudi Arabia, has not quite run out of
steam.
In sum, one cannot put it any better than the headline of an
op-ed by Andreas Harsono in the New York Times:
Indonesia today is “no model for Muslim democracy.”
Update from June 6, 2012: Today
comes a report
in the Jakarta Post, in which an Indonesian think-tank called
Charta Politika discusses encroachment of Shari’a into local
politics, mentioning the specific case of the city of Taskimalaya
in West Java that will soon require all Muslim women — visitors or
residents — to wear veils. Again, it should be emphasized that the
secular trend that was certainly apparent in the early 1970s is
being reversed.
